equipment of the army and navy, the management of the food supply, the control of the proconsuls, the administration of the country, the heroic labours of the terrible Committee, rested in other hands. Robespierre was only its tireless rhetorician, watching, manœuvring, expatiating incessantly on his ideals, his virtues and himself. Even after the fall of Danton, when he had ample scope for his designs, all that he contributed as a practical reformer to the Utopia which he had described a hundred times, was a masquerade to the discredit of religion and the most sanguinary police-law which the world has seen. But wrapped as Robespierre was in self-complacency, he was always sufficiently awake to suspect and envy others. The doctrine of mistrust was a part of the Jacobin creed. The habit of suspecting others seemed to grow upon all those who professed the faith, and gradually to distort their views and to discolour their judgment. The Robespierre of 1794, the jealous, nervous, inflated fanatic, was a very different being from the earnest, narrow-minded lawyer, who had set out from Arras five years before to take his part in regenerating France. As Marat had developed, under the influence of the Jacobin theory and amid the desperate excitements of the time, from a soured idealist into the furious advocate of murder, so Robespierre had developed too. The mania of panic and suspicion had settled upon him. The peril which he and his colleagues encountered had convinced him that he was a martyr, and that all who did not recognise his virtues were conspirators seeking for his death. 'Gazing on the multitude of vices which the torrent of the Revolution has rolled down,' he cried in his last great speech in the Convention, 'I have sometimes trembled lest I should be soiled by the impure neighbourhood of wicked men.... I know that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to overwhelm a single individual; but I know also what is the duty of a man who can die in defence of humanity.' In the latter part of Robespierre's career it seemed that nothing was too innocent for him to mistrust or too improbable for him to suspect. 'I am not obliged to reflect,' he told Garat, 'I always rely on first impressions.' He believed that his instinct could not err, and his instinct always was to think the worst. 'Evidently,' he said one day to Garat, early in the spring of 1793, 'the Girondists are conspiring.' 'Where?' asked Garat. 'Everywhere,' answered Robespierre. He needed no facts to prove it. His virtue, the watchdog of the Republic, told him it was true. At one moment Lafayette was the traitor, at another Brissot, at another Dumouriez, at another Hébert. Servan, he insisted, was given a command in the Pyrenees, in order to hand over the keys of France to Spain. 'Is there no doubt of this in your mind?' asked Garat. 'None whatever,' replied the infallible pedant. Again and again Robespierre denounced